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Saturday, February 1, 2014

This blog is going carbon neutral (or so I hope!)

Goodbye January, hello February! Can you believe how fast the first month of 2014 has passed by? Yep, it is already 1st February and that means that a twelfth part of this not-so-new year is already gone. It also means that we are already halfway through the winter and I haven't seen a single snowflake in Basel. Unbelievable! Almost everytime that I've watched the news during this past month I've read headlines of the US preparing for yet another winterstorm while in Europe we're enjoying a very mild winter with temperatures above zero and no snow in town at all. Even my mother tells me almost everyday that this winter is being incredibly cold in Tenerife and it has already snowed three or four times there this season. So how come we are not getting any of this in Basel? Some might say the weather is crazy but I call it climate change.

Snowier times in Basel ... I miss them!

I was doing my usual blog reading this morning and this post from Pilar of Petit Colibri really caught my eye. She was making her blog carbon neutral and adopting a tree in return. 'Why?', I wondered, 'what wrong is a blog doing to our environment?'. Well, I clicked quickly to her link to learn more about it and it seems that

a blog hitting 15000 pageviews per month generates around 3.6 Kg of CO2 per year. That is 0.3 Kg per month, which doesn't sound like much. But if you consider all the blogs out there and do the maths, well, that's a lot of CO2 wastage derived from the electric consumption of computers and servers and their refrigeration systems.

Several organizations in Europe have come up with a project to mitigate, if possible, the effects of these carbon emissions. An average tree absorbs around 5 Kg of CO2 per year from the atmosphere and it would then offset the CO2 emissions of an average blog. Thus, if every blogger would plant a tree, they would be somehow neautralising the CO2 their blogs produce. And that's the simple idea behind this 'carbon neutral blog' project. These organizations are giving bloggers the chance to adopt a tree for free as a symbolical gesture to offset their carbon emissions. All you have to do is send them a mail with your blog address and grab a button stating that your blog is carbon neutral. As simple as that! I have just joined pro Tierra and I have seen similar iniciatives in France, Germany and Russia, but none in English. If you know about a similar carbon offset scheme from an English-speaking country, just share the link.

Thanks, Pilar, for sharing this good idea - I hope you get inspired and join along as well :)
I'm now going offline to enjoy some old-fashioned and non-polluting book reading.

What a fabulous project! First, I'm astounded by the statistics. Who would've thought? Good for her. No snow for us (it didn't reach us), but the US has been getting hit left and right with snow storms. My british readers have been talking about a lack of snow. Ah-mazing!http://www.averysweetblog.com/

Thanks for following!

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